Pages Tagged “Mars”
Reviews
- A City on Mars
★★★★★
Kelly and Zach Weinersmith
Accessible and intricately researched, with scattered humor to keep the reader’s interest. Getting to space is the easy part. Staying there is going to be a lot more complicated. - Soonish
★★★★★
Kelly and Zach Weinersmith
Fascinating, accessible, funny, and still relevant overview of cutting-edge tech, even though it took me 7 years to get around to reading it. - Tales From The Bully Pulpit
A sci-fi comedy graphic novel featuring a time-traveling Teddy Roosevelt and the ghost of Thomas Edison, battling a descendant of Adolf Hitler. On Mars. Wearing mecha armor. - Under Alien Skies
★★★★★
Philip Plait
A fun look at what it would be like to visit other planets or star systems, weaving together sci-fi scenarios, the science behind them, and the history of how those discoveries were made.
Blog Posts
- Lost Cities and Alien Skies
You wouldn’t think that books about astronomy and archaeology would have a lot in common, but Four Lost Cities and Under Alien Skies pack some odd similarities.
- Blue Sunsets on Mars
One of many cool facts brought up in Phil Plait’s new book, Under Alien Skies is that Martian sunsets are blue! On Earth, nitrogen scatters light randomly, with bluer colors scattering more than redder colors, so the ambient sky is blue, but when you’re looking toward the sun at a shallow angle (like sunrise or […]
- Venus and Mars are all right tonight
There’s nothing like a conjunction to remind you just how much brighter Venus is than, well anything else in the night sky except the moon.
- Celebrating Curiosity at Planetfest 2012
Timed for the Mars Curiosity landing, Planetfest featured mock-ups of capsules and landers, space art, meteorites, robots, speakers and of course a party.
- Foolish Links
IE9 to include alternative CSS.2012 standard instead of following anything remotely like the rest of the world. Social tagging initiative from WaSP to physically tag bad web designers. Opera hits 106/100 on Acid3 after discovering an Easter egg in the test. The openSUSE mailing list announced OpenSUSE 4.1, with KDE 4.1, GNOME 4.1, MP41 support, OpenOffice 4.1, XEN 4.1, VirtualBox 4.1, […]
- Bully!
At long last, I’ve located a copy of Tales from the Bully Pulpit! It’s a sci-fi comedy graphic novel featuring a time-traveling Teddy Roosevelt and the ghost of Thomas Edison, battling a descendant of Adolf Hitler. On Mars. Wearing mecha armor. (No, really, I am not making this up!) Seriously, how can you co wrong […]
- Lunar Eclipse pics
I decided to go for it, and set my alarm for 2:30 AM (ick) to see the eclipse. The moon was nearing totality at that point, with a too-shallow crescent near the bottom and the rest in slightly reddish shadow. My original plan was to lie down on the balcony and watch, but it turned […]
- Hollywood and Space
Some interesting comments by Warren Ellis in today’s Bad Signal on film budgets, and Superman Returns in particular. $250 million puts you in spacelaunch-budget territory. For $250 million WB could’ve given Bryan Singer his own communications satellite and spent the change on a George Clooney movie. This is the absurdity of modern Hollywood; that taking […]
- Commies From Mars!
The Grand Comics Database* is a project to index the titles, dates, credits, covers, and character appearances in every comic book ever published. A sidebar on the home page shows the latest cover scan contributed. A couple of days ago, that cover scan was this: The image links to the GCD entry, which is still […]
- April 1 Roundup
Collecting some good April Fools jokes: NPR: New England Suffers Maple Woes Water on Mars (via the Esoteric Science Research Center) Star Wars Holiday Special released on DVD (via Slashdot) My own Googolplex Theaters Other round-ups at CNET, at Slashdot, at Urgo, and at Wikipedia
- It’s All True!
Here are several humor articles that have been posted to the SpamAssassin discussion list over the past week: The TechWeb Spin: All spam is true! (Fredric Paul, Internet Week, June 29, 2004): Yes, you read it here: it’s all true! The author explains about all the money he’s gotten from deposed Nigerian dictators, the software […]
- Far-Flung Finances
In CNN’s report on the discovery that Mars once had liquid water – and thus may have once been hospitable to life – it mentions that the Spirit and Opportunity missions cost about $820 million. The IMDB estimates the budget for Spider-Man 2 at $200 million. In other words, each mission cost two big-budget summer […]